Shaolin Temple Journal; Where Zen and Kung Fu Got Off to a Flying Start

By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: March 28, 1998

SHAOLIN MONASTERY, China—
As you stroll through the nicely restored Shaolin Monastery complex you are apt to be startled when a teen-age boy in a sweatsuit suddenly thrusts a foot into the sky, or another practices the fine art of hanging from a tree by his toes.

This cluster of intricately painted wooden buildings at the foot of Song Mountain in central China is the fabled home of Zen Buddhism and of Asian martial arts. And the unexpected movements represent typical horseplay of students from the dormitory and school on the hill behind the monastery.

The students might be practicing, from among the thousands of special martial moves taught here, one called ''flowers hidden among the leaves,'' in which a leg seems to come out of nowhere, or ''sweeping an army of thousands,'' a powerful swipe with a staff intended to mow down multiple attackers.

If you think that gentle Buddhism seems incompatible with the violent dispatch of opponents by kicking, slugging, bashing with a cudgel or slashing with a sword, then you do not really understand meditation, De Yang says.

At 32, De Yang is an acclaimed master of the monastery's stylized and sometimes bizarre routines of strength and self-defense. He is also one of the senior monks, practicing the form of meditation known in China as Chan and in Japan and the West as Zen.

''Chan and martial arts are one,'' he said on a recent evening. On the wall of the unheated little room that De Yang calls his office, next to an altar filled with offerings of apples and oranges, are posters from exhibitions in the United States and Japan where this exemplar of the famous ''fighting monks'' of Shaolin has performed.

The practice of martial routines, De Yang and other monks explained, is simply a physical expression of Chan, the meditation exercises used in the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment.

Visitors who search for easy truths here, whether about the meaning of Chan or the meaning of a monastery that has become a major tourist attraction, are bound to be disappointed. What is indisputably true is that the monastery is thriving, benefiting from a kung-fu-movie-driven fascination with martial arts and a surge in domestic tourism.

Two million to three million people visit the Shaolin Monastery each year, mainly in the warmer months, enjoying the elegant grounds and buildings filled with old inscriptions, fading murals and various reputed artifacts of the monastery's fabled history. In peak seasons they also watch exhibitions of martial arts routines and see monks break bricks or other hard objects with their heads.

The crowds and shows destroy the serenity and have led to charges of commercialism, but they also bring in money for restoring buildings that were repeatedly vandalized through the centuries, most recently in the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.

In the valley surrounding Shaolin a whole town of curio shops and dozens of competing martial arts schools has sprung up. For 25 cents, visitors walking toward the monastery entrance can also climb into what is billed as Mao's private plane.

The monastery itself houses 78 monks, not all of them martial arts masters. Its school has 400 students, from elementary through high school, including some young adults and foreigners. Only about 20 are girls.

The younger students learn reading and math, but their main purpose is to become accomplished in martial arts. Some dream of becoming fighting monks themselves.

Bai Long, 16, from Inner Mongolia, grew up idolizing the Shaolin fighters. He moved here two years ago and hopes to become a disciple of De Yang, then eventually to take vows as a monk (no sex, no alcohol, no meat). ''It's my ideal,'' he said, blushing.

Other children are sent to this or others of the hundreds of martial arts schools around the country in hopes that the instruction might produce a career if not fame, perhaps on a national team. For poor villagers, especially, this may offer a child a way out from a life of drudgery.

The romance of Shaolin rests on legends that are too good to question. In the sixth century A.D., it is said, an Indian Buddhist missionary called Bodhidharma arrived. He climbed into a cave on nearby Five Breasts Peak and sat in intense meditation for nine years. So persevering was he that his shadow became permanently imprinted on the cave wall, and today that piece of rock, chipped out, is a prime sight in the monastery.

Bodhidharma founded the Chan sect and also, while trying to limber up his cramped limbs during those years of sitting, practiced exercises that would develop into Shaolin martial arts.

Just how stretching was transformed into warrior routines seems to be in some dispute. By some accounts the monks honed their skills to rob from the rich and give to the poor. By others the monks, as some of the richest people around, had to learn to defend themselves from bandits.

In any case, they earned a niche in Chinese history when, in 621, the fighting monks saved a Tang dynasty prince from a conniving opponent, allowing him to become an appreciative emperor. Much later, in 1553, detachments of Shaolin monks were called to the coast to vanquish marauding Japanese pirates.

Today, while the motto of their fighting method remains, ''In defense, like a virgin; in attack, like a tiger,'' the Shaolin school teaches movements that are more akin to acrobatics than actual combat, involving spectacular leaps and swipes.

A few monks, it is asserted, carry on the Shaolin tradition of mastering, through years of trial, peculiar feats of strength like hanging by the neck from trees, standing on their heads with no hands, licking red-hot shovels and, in what is called ''iron crotch kung fu,'' lifting 50-pound weights with their testicles.

Skeptics say the photographs of such skills that are featured in the monastery's books represent tricks of photography. They tell tales of dissolute monks, too. But De Yang insists that all of the time-honored skills are still nurtured by some monks, including himself.

What he is really devoting his abilities to these days, he said, is the spread of Buddhism.

''The Buddhist message of goodness and equality and getting along,'' he said, is what really matters. ''The martial arts are just a small part of it.''

Photo: In the courtyard of the school at the Shaolin Monastery, some of the younger martial arts students demonstrate their moves. ''In defense, like a virgin; in attack, like a tiger'' is the motto, one master says. (Agence France-Presse for The New York Times) Map of China showing location of Shaolin Monastery: The Shaolin Monastery is at the foot of Song Mountain in Henan.